Heather Miller

What happened to distributed programming languages?

Nowadays, most programs we write are in some sense distributed—making HTTP requests or serving responses over HTTP, fetching or computing data on some remote resource, building some microservice that is meant to interact with others, etc. With all of this distribution going on, one might ask, what happened to distributed programming languages? Why are we still using languages like Java or C++ for these sorts of tasks? In this talk, Heather will take us on a whirlwind tour through history up to the present of distributed programming languages as well as programming constructs meant for distribution like futures and RPC. Together, we'll try to work out what happened to all of the distributed programming languages!

Biography

Heather Miller is the executive director of the Scala Center at EPFL, where she is a research scientist, and an Assistant Clinical Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. She recently completed her PhD in EPFL's Faculty of Computer and Communication Science where she contributed to the now-widespread programming language, Scala. Heather's research interests are at the intersection of data-centric distributed systems and programming languages, with a focus on transferring her research results into industrial use. She has also led development of popular MOOCs some 800,000 students strong, such as "Functional Programming Principles in Scala."